Willy Russell's comedy One for the Road should really be called Why Life
Begins at Forty, says Dominic Cavendish.

Educating Rita: great title. Shirley Valentine: great title. Blood Brothers: ditto. One for the Road? Um, yes, well. You can see why Willy Russell’s comedy – first written in 1976 and much revised thereafter – hardly stands out from the crowd amid the Merseysider’s enduring, high-achieving corpus of work.

Aside from the fact that “One for the Road” is also the title of a better known Pinter one-act play about a family suffering a brutal interrogation, the play should surely be called – and I accept cash or cheques, Willy – “Life Begins at Forty”, because that’s its theme. Hitting middle-age and the bottle, Dennis is a man living on a sprawling new housing estate who has attained all the right, respectable things – wife, kid, good job – but hates what he has become, feels he has betrayed his youthful dreams and wants out, somehow.

The opening of Laurie Sansom’s typically adroit revival at the Theatre Royal Northampton – his swansong as artistic director before heading off to run the National Theatre of Scotland – sees Con O’Neill’s rumpled Dennis slouching in the sitting-room mournfully listening to Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard” – about a Sixties kid who “got married to a figure skater/bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator”. Obsessed with keeping up appearances, his wife Pauline (Michelle Butterly) is too busy preparing their bungalow and cooking a hachis Parmentier (that’s cottage pie to you) for their self-satisfied guests, Roger and Jane, to have time for his plaintive midlife crisis.

With a motif about creative vandalism – the estate’s garden gnomes are suffering mysterious decapitations – safe-as-houses gags about Terry Wogan and John Denver and lurching twists, you could accuse the evening of lacking the genuine creative fire that Dennis craves. Yet, the evening delivers plenty of belly-laughs as spirals into farcical chaos, on the way offering some valuable, sobering thoughts about how we square settling down with the undying urge to have fun and seek adventure.

O’Neill thoroughly convinces as the coarsened hipster manque, finding surprising depth in his character’s growling frustrations despite a scenario, nicely accentuated by Jessica Curtis’s toy-town design, that mainly plumbs suburban shallows. If the rest of the cast – with Matthew Wait and Nicola Stephenson entertaining as the nonplussed visitors – can only serve up borderline caricature, they merely reflect the limitations of the inhibiting social situation they are in. Recommended.